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Palestinians back Standing Rock Sioux in “struggle for all humanity”

Artwork in solidarity with Standing Rock and the water protectors. (Leila Abdelrazaq)

Palestinians are expressing support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their months-long resistance to the US government’s plan to install an oil pipeline on their land.

“The people of Palestine supports you and all those standing with you right now in North Dakota to protect your tribal lands and resist the desecration and destruction of your sacred burial sites at the hands of the Energy Transfer Partners corporation and the Dakota Access Pipeline they are building,” the Palestinian BDS National Committee said on Friday.

In another statement issued on Friday, individual Palestinians around the world say they “recognize the multitude of ways that Native American and First Nation struggles to protect indigenous territories have ultimately been struggles on behalf of all of humanity.”

The Dakota Access Pipeline, which was approved by the US Army Corps of Engineers, is planned to run under the Missouri River, a natural water supply for the tribe.

The pipeline would also run through sacred areas of Sioux land not recognized by the US government as part of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

“When we look at Standing Rock, we also see the attempts of authorities with a still-prevalent colonial mentality to vilify, criminalize and ultimately disappear indigenous people on their own land,” the BNC said. “The Palestinian people have firsthand experience with a colonial power desecrating our burial sites, destroying our indigenous communities, appropriating our culture and otherwise gradually erasing our centuries-old heritage.”

The BNC, the largest Palestinian civil society coalition that leads the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, referred in particular to Israel allowing the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a so-called “Museum of Tolerance” on top of Mamilla Cemetery, destroying a Muslim burial ground and holy site in Jerusalem that historians date to the seventh century.

On Friday, a US federal court ruled against a request filed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop construction of the pipeline.

However, in what the Sioux call “a stunning move,” three federal agencies say the Army will “not authorize” construction of the pipeline in one area until the government “can determine whether it will need to reconsider any of its previous decisions” regarding construction on tribal land.

“This federal statement is a game changer for the tribe and we are acting immediately on our legal options, including filing an appeal and a temporary injunction to force [the Dakota Access Pipeline] to stop construction,” the Standing Rock Sioux said.

As an indigenous people whose lands have been robbed and pillaged, and who face existential settler-colonial expansion in Palestine, we recognize that Native American and First Nation peoples have endured centuries of violent settler colonialism that has dismantled and robbed them of home, heritage, dignity, security, narrative, land, language, identity, family, trees, cemeteries, animals, livelihoods and life.

We recognize the multitude of ways that Native American and First Nation struggles to protect indigenous territories have ultimately been struggles on behalf of all of humanity to save the Earth we share from toxic globalization of neoliberal and capitalist ethos that threaten our collective survival.

We also heed the wise leadership of a people who first conceived of mountains and rivers as sacred, who look upon a prairie with reverence, who consider trees as family and who risk their lives to protect the water and the integrity of their ancestral lands.

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Once again, Palestinians reach out in solidarity to peoples facing oppression, expropriation and cultural genocide. Now ask yourselves, to whom is Israel reaching out in like fashion? The Saudi royal family, the leading arms manufacturers, and the United States Treasury.